Murder at the Watergate

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Authors: Margaret Truman
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upon who you were, and this administration seemed content with the status quo where Mexico was concerned despite … 
despite
all the facts andfigures the Mexico desk had gathered, chewed on, spit out, and ingested again like cows. Verplank knew them by heart; he’d lived with them for eleven years.
    Seventy-five percent of all cocaine entering the United States came across the Mexican–U.S. border, supplanting Florida as the route of choice for Colombian drug barons.
    Billions of dollars in drug money were being laundered through myriad Mexican political leaders, officials, families, and hangers-on, making them rich. A recent listing by
Forbes
magazine of the world’s wealthiest individuals had thirteen Mexicans on it; Mexico now ranked only behind the United States, Germany, and Japan as having the most billionaires.
    Certain drug lords in Mexico had recently gone on a killing spree, eliminating anyone posing a threat to their empires. These were equal opportunity murders: members of the clergy, reluctant politicians, rogue members of the police and other law enforcement agencies who didn’t cooperate, and citizens who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, all were fair game.
    Mexico, Verplank knew, had become what was being called a narco democracy. As far as he was concerned, the country’s leadership and its drug kingpins were interchangeable. It wasn’t even debatable. The facts said it all, and Craig Verplank believed in facts. If he were calling the shots—and of course, he wasn’t—Mexico would be called to account, to purge its political system of the pervasive influence of drug money before benefiting from any future American largesse, and until what Mexico’s leading political analyst, Jesus Silva Herzog,had written was no longer true: “Politics is the easiest and most profitable profession in Mexico.”
    He answered the question. “Garza was brought here to testify.”
    A burst of questions from everyone at the table: “Testify?” “Where?” “Congress?” “A committee?” “A hearing?”
    “TMI. The Mexico Initiative.”
    “That private think tank?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why would someone like this Garza character be brought to Washington to talk to them?”
    Verplank said he didn’t know the details, just that he’d been told on the phone last night by LaHoya and Kramer that Garza was coming to Washington to brief The Mexico Initiative on corruption in Mexico.
    The youngest member at the table said, “If that’s so, plenty of Mexicans would have wanted him dead.”
    “My thinking exactly.”
    “He had nothing on him. Am I right?” another man asked.
    “That’s the information we have.”
    “Then it could have been a robbery gone awry.”
    “Possible,” said Verplank.
    “Who’s funding that think tank?” Verplank was asked.
    “People who want to change our direction with Mexico,” Verplank said.
    “People with
money
who want us to change direction.”
    A nod from Verplank.
    Verplank wanted to end the meeting, hadn’t wanted to call it in the first place. But protocol dictated that he brief senior members of the staff. Besides, he knew that if hedidn’t, speculation would percolate and boil over, like an unwatched pot.
    “Nothing in the paper this morning about this,” a man at the end of the table offered. “Just a DC murder. At the Watergate. Why was he there?”
    “At the Watergate?”
    “Yes.”
    “Maybe he was staying there.”
    Verplank said, “I think we might as well wrap this up. Naturally, this stays in the room with us. When and if I receive further information, there’ll be another briefing.”
    As they filed from the room to return to their homes and an afternoon of golf, or tennis, or baseball watching on TV, the youngest staff member took Verplank aside.
    “Craig,” he said, “I heard recently that the Initiative isn’t as private an organization as it wants us to believe.”
    “Oh? Where did you hear that?”
    “A friend

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